What To Do If Your Home Inspection Reveals Problems

“What do we do about this? How much is this going to cost? Who is going to pay for it!” The list goes on.

There are a lot of questions you may have about what to do next after you receive your home inspection report, and we’ll try to outline them for you here. Hold on and don’t freak out yet though; all houses have problems! Even brand new houses have problems, especially if you live in the San Antonio area. Outlined below are a few tips on your next step to move forward with your home (or not!).

Send the Inspection Report to Your Realtor

The first thing you should do after receiving your report is send it to your realtor if we didn’t already do that. If you’re a home-buyer that doesn’t have experience buying houses and you’re not working with a realtor, we highly recommend you get one to guide you through the process. If you’re in the San Antonio or New Braunfels area, we’ll refer you to one. Your agent needs to get the report ASAP so that they can begin reviewing the deficiencies found and crafting a repair list for the seller.

Consult With Your Inspector

Unless you are a general contractor with years of experience and a roladex full of sub-contractors to call and get estimates from, talk to your inspector about what they think is the biggest priority to address and if they have recommendations for how to address it. Not all deficiencies are cause for alarm, and some are more important than others. While your inspector shouldn’t be giving recommendations on specifically what contractor to call (that’s a conflict of interest), they should be telling you what type of contractor to call and what items are most important to get handled.

After your realtor has read the report and you’ve consulted with your inspector, it’s time for you and the realtor to create a punch-list of items to be addressed that you will send to the seller and use to negotiate concessions. This is one reason why it is important to get an experienced realtor on your side to ensure that the primary concerns are addressed and not brushed off, as well as ensuring that the contract terms are written in such a way that the seller can’t weasel out of them on a technicality.

Negotiate With Seller

Your realtor will send the listing agent the punch-list for them to consider, and the negotiation process begins. Yet again, having an experienced realtor on your team pays off. I will say that you shouldn’t expect every item on a home inspection report to be addressed by the seller; instead know your priority fixes and push hard on those, while using the smaller, less significant concerns as a bargaining chip to be handled at a later time. If the seller doesn’t want to pay a painter to caulk some exterior siding, let that slide, but make sure they address the roof leak!

Get a Re-Inspection/Follow-Up Inspection

Technically optional, but of course we would advise that you call up Ensure Home Inspections (if you live in the San Antonio area) to re-inspect the repaired items to ensure that everything was completed as planned. Most inspectors will perform a re-inspection at a significantly discounted rate or even free of charge as a courtesy to customers. Take advantage of that and make sure that the repairs were performed correctly!